research-article

CUBIC: a new TCP-friendly high-speed TCP variant

Authors:

Injong Rhee, and

Lisong XuAuthors Info & Claims

ACM SIGOPS Operating Systems Review, Volume 42, Issue 5

Pages 64 - 74

https://doi.org/10.1145/1400097.1400105

Published: 01 July 2008 Publication History

Abstract

CUBIC is a congestion control protocol for TCP (transmission control protocol) and the current default TCP algorithm in Linux. The protocol modifies the linear window growth function of existing TCP standards to be a cubic function in order to improve the scalability of TCP over fast and long distance networks. It also achieves more equitable bandwidth allocations among flows with different RTTs (round trip times) by making the window growth to be independent of RTT -- thus those flows grow their congestion window at the same rate. During steady state, CUBIC increases the window size aggressively when the window is far from the saturation point, and the slowly when it is close to the saturation point. This feature allows CUBIC to be very scalable when the bandwidth and delay product of the network is large, and at the same time, be highly stable and also fair to standard TCP flows. The implementation of CUBIC in Linux has gone through several upgrades. This paper documents its design, implementation, performance and evolution as the default TCP algorithm of Linux.

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Index Terms

CUBIC: a new TCP-friendly high-speed TCP variant
1. Networks
  1. Network protocols
2. Software and its engineering
  1. Software organization and properties
    1. Contextual software domains
      1. Operating systems
        Communications management

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Published In

cover image ACM SIGOPS Operating Systems Review

ACM SIGOPS Operating Systems Review Volume 42, Issue 5

Research and developments in the Linux kernel

July 2008

113 pages

ISSN:0163-5980

DOI:10.1145/1400097

Issue’s Table of Contents

Copyright © 2008 Authors.

Publisher

Association for Computing Machinery

New York, NY, United States

Publication History

Published: 01 July 2008

Published in SIGOPS Volume 42, Issue 5

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